... as COMECON), and the Warsaw Pact. By 1949, with Europe divided into two camps and both the USA and the USSR embarked on a nuclear arms race, the Cold War was under way. It might therefore be supposed that Kennan was a supporter of the Vietnam War, of the neo-Conservative revolution in foreign policy which began with Reagan, and maybe even of the recent war against Iraq. In fact since 1950 his has been one of the leading dissident voices in US foreign policy. For over 50 years Kennan has argued that his policy was distorted and transformed into a monster. It was indeed his intention to focus on the long-term strategic danger presented to the USA ...

... "Transnationalised Repression" also seems only too relevant to U.S. politics in Nicaragua, as we learn of support for the Contras from first Argentina and Israel, and now allegedly from South Africa. The restrained optimism of the essay's conclusions, written in the first year of the Carter presidency, may sound a little odd after six years of Reagan. Support for drug-running criminals has moved from being the dark underside of U.S. foreign policy to (in the case of the Nicaraguan Contras) being at that policy's visible centre. In 1977 I was concerned about the access of foreign parafascists and WACL publicists to the office of Senator Thurmond and the staff of the National Security Council. ...

... wing advocating the legalisation of drugs, for example, and risking the creation of a 'loony right' to balance the 'loony left' of the Labour Party which the central office and its supportive media were working hard to manufacture in the 1980s. The young anarcho-capitalists who took over the Fellowship of Conservative Students detested socialism and communism and shared the Reagan administration's view of the Soviet Union as 'the evil empire'. They thus became useful, minor foreign policy propaganda assets for the Reagan administration. Supporting any movement which was perceived as anti-socialist/communist, the FCS became cheerleaders for whichever bunch of murderous thugs happened to be getting support from Washington: Renamo and the Contras come to mind ...

... 1787-88), written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay et al., as well as the followers of the Federalist Society (founded in 1982), an extremely influential association of scholars, jurists, and legal professionals, including members of the US high judiciary, that considers itself to be conservative and libertarian. 9 Ronald Reagan, Remarks at the Annual Dinner of the Conservative Political Action Conference, 1 March 1985. Salvadoran population was either killed or forced into exile by 'freedom fighters'.) Since Ronald Reagan had long been dismissed as senile at best and a lunatic at worst, remarks like these were treated as offensive but more or less right-wing boilerplate. ...

... ? In fact there are Establishment members who appear to have joined the counter-Establishment or even abandoned the Establishment as a whole (although these do not appear to publish in sufficient quantities to make even a provisional judgement possible). Paul Craig Roberts is one example. If one reads his work over the entire time span from his days in the Reagan administration until today, he appears to have become about as vehement an anti- capitalist as one can imagine. At the same time, at least in correspondence I had with him, he sees no contradiction between his present writing and his support for Ronald Reagan. Does that mean that we should read Mr Roberts' texts as an ...

... empire, despite John F Kennedy's attempts to stop this. The big issue is that the overseas earnings of the US multinationals (in 2009 estimated at $1 trillion) are held tax free, offshore, greatly advantaging those corporations. The author describes how attempts to control US money supply in 1979-81 were thwarted; and six months after Ronald Reagan took office the International Banking Facility was introduced in America, allowing US banks to pretend to be overseas banks. Thus the US moved to the UK model of banking. In 1986 the Japanese followed, leading to their spectacular market crash as $400 billion surged into their markets, creating a crisis from which they have yet to emerge ...

... operations that were blatantly illegal, not to mention immoral. (2) In a few instances this aid may have been provided solely for financial or narrow political gain, but in most cases it also resulted from a convergence of the rightist political aims of both the 'private' groups and factions within the national security apparatus created by President Ronald Reagan and his advisors. Among the groups that have participated in these activities are the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), the Air Commando Association (ACA), the National Defense Council (NDC), Refugee Relief International (RRI), Civilian Military/Material Assistance (CMA), and Sun-Myung Moon's cultic Unification Church (UC) ...

... by the CIA were useless because there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found but this could not be admitted as it would stymie the planned war and the agency was unwilling to openly oppose the government. 'Cooking' intelligence 'Cooking', i.e. falsifying intelligence is not something new. Robert Baer, quoted above, referred to the Reagan administration's campaign against Libya's Colonel Gadafy. It goes back further than that. The intelligence on the strength of the Vietcong was faked to make the case for war more plausible. CIA analyst Sam Adams published a piece in Harper's, in May 1975, describing the way the military had ignored his estimates of the strength of the Vietcong; ...

... ever- excellent Consortium News. It turns out that Mr Murdoch was schmoozed into participating in a CIA 'perception management' operation in 1983, the object of which was to provide support for Ronald Reagan's obsession with 'protecting' Central America in general and Nicaragua in particular – 'America's backyard', in the parlance of the day. Messrs Murdoch and Reagan first met on 18 January 1983, just five days after Reagan had been informed by lawyers that (since Congress would quite obviously never approve it) the project would need private funding. It's not clear how much money Mr Murdoch doled out to his patron's pet projects, but subsequent developments show clearly how Reagan's White House manipulated events to ...

... a case for both sides but I will only respect those assessments of Kennedy which make a distinction between the man who was elected to office- and I have few good things to say about him; he was a regular Cold Warrior who came in with a 'missile gap' threat, who was going to do a lot of the things Reagan has done- and the Kennedy who had been to the brink in the Cuban Missile Crisis and had had to think about what it really meant to use nuclear weapons as a threat against a nuclear power. The only Kennedy I find interesting- indeed, this is true of both the brothers- is that year, after the Missile ...